The world of modern physics is full of strange and glorious paradoxes. One of the most startling, because it deals with something we all experience, is the notion that light behaves as both wave and particle. Until recently it was believed that you could observe one or the other of these conditions, but not both simultaneously. However, now scientists have come up with a way of photographing both at once. As might be expected, this dual nature of light yields an image of eerie beauty.
For poets, too, light has long been possessed of contrasting significances. In Milton’s Sonnet 19 (traditionally known as On His Blindness, although the poet gave it no title), light stands for the poet’s life and, possibly, his sight, which he worries about having wasted in the eyes of his God. By way of contrast, Dante Gabriel Rossetti uses the image of sudden light as a way of expressing the deja vu-like realisation that an experience is being relived, that “we’ve been here before”. Rossetti’s light of love that renews our lives is somewhat more carnal than Milton’s wish to please the divine.
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